The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War) (3 page)

His mother. A woman who might very well have been an
immortal – an angel come down to earth – who fell in love with Danner’s father
and begot Danner as a son. So far it was the only explanation for his unique
abilities.

“Danner, are you
awake?”

The sudden voice inside Danner’s head jolted him back from
his musings, and he cursed mildly as he realized the paladin was almost out of
sight.

“Sort of,”
he thought back, knowing Trebor would hear
his thoughts. Trebor Dok could read minds and even project his own thoughts
into other people’s, a trait that was rare in his people, but not unheard of.
Trebor was a denarae, and his was perhaps the most despised race in the world
because of their mental abilities, what they called kything.
[7]
They were physically identical to humans
in every way except skin tone; their flesh ranged from charcoal gray to a light
ashen color. At one point in history, denarae and humans had been close, until
men began to fear the mind-reading abilities of their inhuman cousins, and so
they had turned on the denarae. Since then, the gray-skinned demi-humans had
hidden their talents from others until no one remembered their existence. Now
people hated denarae simply because they were supposed to. It was
institutionalized bigotry.

“Thanks for the history lesson, Danner, but can we get
back to the problem at hand? Did you find him?”
Trebor kythed to him. It
was Danner’s job to identify the men they were observing, using his keen eyes
to spot them from a greater distance than the others could. Since his…
transformation
…in
the mountains, Danner had rapidly developed several abilities that he was still
struggling to understand and master.

“Yes. He’s just
passing Eighth Avenue. He’s a Yellow, but I couldn’t tell much more than that.
Have Michael pick him up for confirmation, then he’s all yours,”
Danner
said mentally.

“Will do.”

His part finished for now, Danner hurried to the side of the
building in the direction the Yellow paladin had gone and leapt from the roof. His
pale-blue cloak fluttered behind him as Danner slowly glided to the nearest
roof that was a dozen feet or so below him. The cloak was one he’d borrowed
from the storage locker in one of the training quads, and it was identical in
function to the cloaks worn by full paladins. If the wearer so desired, the
cloak would slow his descent to a gentle glide, a necessity for warriors who
typically rode on the backs of the great winged dakkans. The draconic mounts
carried the paladins both on the ground and in the air, and a fall from an
airborne dakkan would mean a certain death were it not for the cloaks.

The vibrant cloaks were unlike any others made by men, and
they had become a singular symbol of the Prismatic Order. No one had ever
successfully duplicated one – conventional wisdom held it was impossible due to
their blessed nature, and any attempts at forgery were viewed as heretical and
dealt with severely. The blessed cloaks were reserved solely for full-fledged
paladins, but they kept thousands of lesser-quality ones on-hand for training
purposes, such as those Danner and his friends were using.

They were all wearing them illicitly, which was grounds for
serious punishment by their trainers – if they were caught by the wrong people,
of course. Danner and Flasch were both well-accomplished thieves, and breaking
into the storage room to remove and replace a half-dozen cloaks was child’s
play to them.

Danner hurried across the roof and leapt to the next roof,
then he asked Trebor for directions. When he received his reply, he turned in a
new direction and abruptly stopped. The next building he had to get to was
twenty feet higher than the one he was on and had no ladder on this face.

“Well, I suppose I could use the practice,” he muttered to
himself. Danner closed his eyes and forced himself to relax. After a moment, a
slight tingling ripped through the back of his shoulders, then it was instantly
replaced by a cool feeling of relief that spread rapidly to his whole body.
When he opened his eyes, Danner saw a blue nimbus out the corner of each eye.

Sprouting from Danner’s back as though he wore no clothing
at all were two glowing, blue wings. A thick tendril of bright blue light
emerged from around each shoulder blade, fanning out like long, snake-like
fingers. Trailing downward from each tendril were lighter, nearly invisible,
auras that resembled feathers. When his friends looked at them, they told him
they couldn’t quite seem to focus on the lighter glow, and that it shifted from
looking feather-like to nothing more than a blur in their eyes.

To Danner, though, each feather stood out in stark detail.
This was his mysterious legacy that could only have come from his mother, or so
they now believed. The few paladins who knew about Danner’s condition thought
perhaps he was half-immortal, though the exact manner and nature of his
conception was still beyond them. Since the unveiling of his wings the day he’d
destroyed the demon two weeks before, Danner had taken a few opportunities to
familiarize himself with the concept of flying under his own power. He never
used them where anyone else might see, because he didn’t want to seem like some
sort of freak or abomination. For the first time, Danner felt like he knew some
of the discomfort his uncle experienced since returning from Hell.

Danner pumped his wings a few times, then slowly lifted
himself from the ground. This was the trickiest part for him, getting airborne.
It was so easy to lose his concentration and overbalance himself; then Danner
would end up listing and even crash into something if he didn’t correct himself
quickly enough. He was getting the hang of it, and this time he was able to fly
forward without losing his balance. Once he was actually in the air, his
control improved dramatically. As soon as his feet touched down on the other
roof, Danner stilled his wings and allowed them to disappear; the glowing
apparitions faded and flickered briefly at the edge of his vision, then winked
out of existence entirely.

Using his wings still felt strange, because it came so
naturally to him. It was like a newborn child learning to crawl: the baby
doesn’t question that his arms and legs move, he just wants to move in a
certain direction and eventually his limbs comply. Control and mastery would
come in time, but for now Danner was content with his progress at crawling, as
it were, and would learn to walk and run later.

The next few rooftops passed without incident, and Danner at
last found himself gliding toward the roof where Garnet, Marc, and Flasch were
crouched in waiting. Flasch whirled at Danner’s light footstep, and Garnet spun
a heartbeat later and laid a hand on his sword hilt. They both relaxed when
they saw it was him, and Danner smiled slightly. Marc looked up from a piece of
paper he was writing on, nodded by way of greeting, then frowned back at his
page, already lost in thought again.

Garnet
jo’Garet
was a giant of a
man, at least a half-head taller than any of them except Michael (who topped
out at nearly seven feet), and his body was just as massively proportioned. He
was the spitting image of his father, Garet
jo’Meerkit
,
the Red paladin who accompanied Danner’s uncle on his quest. By contrast,
Flasch
jo’Keer
was a small, tightly muscled wisp of a
man, but he was nearly as fast as Danner. Marc
Tanus
was of average height and build, with olive skin and straight, dark hair. He
bore a strong resemblance to his twin sister Alicia, the barmaid who caused
Danner no end of emotional turmoil.

They were all dressed in thick, dark-tinted clothes to ward
off the night’s chill, and despite their mission, none had donned armor for the
evening’s activities. If it came to needing armor, they were in trouble
already.

“What’s up, Danner?” Flasch asked.

“I should be asking you that,” he replied. “I’ve been on the
move, so Trebor didn’t distract me by filling me in. Did Michael pick him up?”

“Yeah, he saw him, he verified your ID and passed
confirmation on to Trebor,” Garnet said quietly. “Trebor’s peeking around in
his head right now.”

Danner nodded, then settled down to wait.

- 2 -

A short while later, Michael
Semnriak
glided down from the building across the street and landed by their side.
Michael was a tall, charismatic young man who smiled easily. He was also a good
judge of character and helped keep things running smoothly between them and the
other trainees. Several of their peers were jealous of the success of their
group, and Michael did a superb job of keeping that jealousy in check by making
sure the other trainees knew they could always come to them for help and advice.
He did it in such a way that none were offended, something Danner knew he never
could have done.

Theirs was a well-balanced group, which accounted largely
for their success in overcoming every obstacle and excelling in their training.

“Any word from Trebor?” Michael whispered.

“None,” Marc replied. “Now shush.”

Danner glanced at Marc and saw that his face was buried in a
book, with one free hand busy making notes on a scrap of paper off to one side.
As far as Danner could tell, his friend wasn’t even looking at the words he was
writing. More and more of late, Marc had shown increasing interest in looking
through books on history and religion. He said he was looking for something
that might help them, but Danner privately thought Marc just enjoyed knowing
things. His occasional tendency to spout out useless trivia notwithstanding,
he’d spent most of his life absorbing knowledge from books and was eager to
share what he’d learned. It wasn’t so much bragging or lording it over his
friends, as much as it was a desire to be useful.

Marc had only an average hand with a blade, he wasn’t fast
like Danner and Flasch, he didn’t have Trebor’s mental abilities or his
apparent talent with healing, and he couldn’t deal with people the way Michael
could. In some of the adventure books Danner had read as a child, that would
either leave Marc to be the leader of the group or else the most expendable
person who would then die and prove the seriousness of a situation. But this
wasn’t a book, it was real life, and Marc had a serious need to prove himself
to the rest of the group. So he did it in the only way he could: he read, and
he studied, and he learned in the hopes of finding things that would help them.

“Oh, Danner,” Marc said, finally looking up, “I found some
information on that little project you gave me.”

“Do tell.”

“I’ve only found one mention of an immortal assuming a
completely mortal guise, though it had to have been more common,” Marc told him
quietly. “I mean we know there were quite a few immortals during the original
Merging War, and surely some of them…”

“Marc, focus,” Danner reminded him.

“Right. Anyway, the description was translated from another
immortal, so they included the words he used,” his friend went on, finally
getting closer to his point. “When the immortal displayed his wings, it was
called
asolving
, and when he hid them again, it was
dekinting
.”

“I still like turning on and off,” Flasch said helpfully.

“I’m not a switch on some gnome’s contraption,” Danner said with
a trace of irritation. He looked back at Marc. “Thanks. At least I know what to
call it now.”

Marc smiled and poked Flasch with the back side of his
writing stick.

“I’ve got everything I need from this one,”
Trebor’s
voice said inside Danner’s head. The look on the others’ faces told Danner they
had received the same message.
“He’s relatively unimportant, so we’re safe
in taking him in.”

“Good,”
Danner
replied.
“Pick an intersection we can
reach, then wait for us there.”

Danner waited until Trebor had relayed a destination and set
of directions, then he and the others were off. Following Trebor’s directions
was complicated, because he couldn’t tell what buildings or obstacles they
might encounter. He could only tell where they were and how far away relative
to his own position, and even that was unspecific. Fortunately there was only
one building too tall for them to either jump to or easily circumvent, and it
had a ladder on the side for them to use. A few blocks later, they reached
Trebor and settled down behind the lip of the roof to plan.

Trebor’s skin almost seemed to glow in the dark night. The
chemicals he rubbed into his flesh to turn it from gray to white left him
abnormally pale and, because it was an unnatural coloring, he was unable to
tan. Rather than face odd explanations, he usually preferred to stay in the
shade whenever possible, and he answered the occasional question with the
plausible statement that it was just a strange skin condition.

Garnet leaned forward into their circle and put four rocks
in a square formation on the rooftop.

“Here’s us. Danner, you and Marc go here,” he said,
motioning to the stone that represented the building across the street.
“Michael here. Flasch, you go to that building and Trebor and I will stay here.
Trebor, stay here. You’re our lookout and coordinator. This is the tallest
building of the four, so you should be able to see everything. Flasch, you move
first, but don’t engage. Just scuttle around and unsettle him. Be ready for
anything. Marc, you move in next; let him see you, but keep your distance.
Danner, Michael, and I will all move in together, via Trebor’s directions. One
of you should be distracting enough to keep his attention, then I’ll move in to
take him.

“We don’t know how strong a fighter he is, even if he is a
Yellow, so nobody engage but me or Michael unless it becomes necessary.
Understand?”